“Just relax. I’m just a person. I’m not going to run for mayor. I don’t have a political agenda.”

Margaret Atwood is doing her best to be patient but she isn’t finding it easy dealing with this dim-witted reporter.

The interview with one of Canada’s most acclaimed writers began well enough, on a warm morning in midsummer. I wished her early best wishes for her 75th birthday on Nov. 18, telling her I find it hard to think of her as 75. Of course, she’s aged, but high cheekbones, distinctive short curls and amused, upward curving lines of her face make her one of those lucky women who never stop looking like themselves. And she has another collection of stories due out Sept. 9 but our interview had to be done early to accommodate her summer schedule.

“I don’t even think of myself as being 74,” she says, “but sometimes I use the age card. I say I can’t do that because I’m too old.”

Laughter. So far, so good.

She calls 75 “a nice round number”and says she has the same energy to write she’s always had, then offers: “We could talk about my toe? Do you want to know what happened to my toe?”

“Yes,” I reply, trying to catch a glimpse of her feet under her publisher’s boardroom table. I sense an anecdote is about to break the ice even more. “What happened to your toe? Did you break it?”

“No, it’s an age thing. Only one has been a problem. Mine has been taken care of,” she says, then adds crisply: “We won’t get into the toes.”

No problem. I’m raring to go with an author whose work I’ve known for years. She’s written more than 40 works of fiction, poetry and critical essays; she’s been published in 35 countries, and has won the Man Booker Prize once (and been shortlisted twice), the Giller Prize and countless other awards. She’s here today to talk about her upcoming collection of nine stories titled Stone Mattress.

A blurb on the cover of my early copy of the Stone Mattress says, “Author of The Handmaid’s Tale,” referring to the 1985 bestseller that’s never been out of print and was made into a movie starring Robert Duvall and Natasha Richardson.

Perfect. Let’s start there.

The chilling dystopian story of a male-run theocracy in which enslaved handmaids are used for breeding knocked a whole generation off its feet, including me. The book Atwood calls “speculative fiction” is a cultural touchstone, its title shorthand for any form of discrimination against women.

“I just wanted to ask mainly how you see women in society ...” I begin, wanting to get a sense of whether she thinks conditions have improved over the past 30 years.

“OK, that’s a very, very big question.” she says. “What women? What society? What age group? What income level? What are we talking about?” her distinctive flat tone becoming less so. “Women are more than half the human race so it’s a lot of people to talk about.”

“Yes,” I say, slightly shaken, “Since you wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, what I want to know is whether you think — in general — things have improved for women?”

“They’ve improved in some ways and they’ve gone backwards in some ways, so it’s very site specific,” she explains.

“Well, let’s look at North America,” I offer.

“Let’s look at North America,” she concurs. “And then you’ve got to go state by state. First country by country and then state by state ...

“Right.”

“So in some states they’re going backwards, in other states things are more open. Some states are allowing gay marriage, which of course affects women who are gay and some states are clamping down on anything to do with female reproduction,” she says. “So it’s very, very, very mixed.”

“Right, but do you think that overall things have gotten worse?”

“There is no overall,” says Atwood.

The interview is going the way of a pileup on the QEW. Pumping desperately at the brakes, I blurt, “I’ve got to take a breath because I haven’t been nervous doing an interview forever — I do a lot of political interviews — but I don’t usually do interviews, uh, with people I admire.”

There’s so much wrong with that statement, it’s embarrassing. I wasn’t really nervous, I just wanted to save this interview. I do, however, admire her work.

“Oh thank you,” she replies, softening. “Just relax. I’m just a person. I’m not going to run for mayor. I don’t have a political agenda.”

The tension eases. Was that a lifeline she just tossed?

‘What do you think of Rob Ford?” I ask, thinking I was picking up her cue.

“Oh puh-leeze. I think what I thought about a year and a half ago when I said, ‘This person needs help.’ ”

(In mid-July when we did the interview, Ford was back in Toronto, after a two-month stint in a rehab facility in Muskoka. He’s running for his second term in the Oct. 27 municipal election.)

Would Atwood consider basing a character on Ford?

“It’s not useful to me,” she replies. “Number 1, it’s too site specific and too person specific. And Number 2, for a fiction writer, it’s too improbable ... Nobody would believe this and that is why people follow the story. They’re thinking: What next? What is going to happen next?”

She talks about addiction and how there are people who live with it every day of their lives. “Keeping clean, keeping out of it, keeping away from it, it’s a constant struggle.”

A pause and she says of Toronto, “I think people want to get back to taking the city seriously. It has a lot of problems and there should be grownups dealing with those problems.

“But as cities go, I can tell you it’s still pretty fortunate. Canada is a pretty fortunate country and Toronto is a pretty fortunate city despite things you might fix here and there.”

“One could have wished they had taken a more Chicago-like approach to their waterfront but still ... (it’s a) very exciting place for young people to be, a lot of creativity here and it’s not yet such a megalopolis that it’s untenable.”

Except for an exasperated, “Ah, c’mon, these aren’t really questions for me. I’m not running for the mayor of Toronto,” in response to a query about civic involvement, the mood seems good.

Overall.

Atwood has the end in sight.

She has more than 500,000 Twitter followers and her tweets caused a highly publicized dust-up in 2011 with Doug Ford, city councillor and the mayor’s brother. She urged her followers to support a petition against closing libraries in Toronto, an idea first broached in a consultant’s report on cost-cutting and embraced by Doug Ford.

“Good luck to Margaret Atwood. I don’t even know her,” said Doug Ford. Unwisely. “If she walked by me, I wouldn’t have a clue who she is.”

He scoffed: “Tell her to go run in the next election and get democratically elected.”

There have been no library closings.

“We have a great public library system, one of the best in the world,” says Atwood. “When it was threatened, kids, everyone from all walks of life, new arrivals, old established citizens, they just piled on to save their library system. That was good civic involvement. There was a deluge of letters and communications.”

She doesn’t mention Ford. He’s not running for re-election in October.

Meanwhile, she chugs along, with Stone Mattress coming out, another novel in the works and her participation in the Hogarth Shakespeare project, in which award-winning authors are “revisiting” Shakespeare for the U.K. publisher. She’s tackling one of her favourite plays, The Tempest.

I ask about the place she has up north with her partner, novelist Graeme Gibson.

“I’m not telling. Why should I tell you?” she asks, as though I’d just requested directions.

“I spend a lot of time in the north in general. I travel in the north. Our old view of nature is that it is very powerful and it may kill you. Our new view of nature is that it is more fragile than we thought.

“But that’s at the end of Survival,” she adds, “which I published in 1972.”

(Survival: Non-fiction, a thematic guide to Canadian literature, reprinted in 2012.)

“Right.”

“So that goes back a while,” she says.

“Right.”

Well, certainly she and I can agree she’s prolific. She has an impressively long list of novels, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, television scripts and articles.

No, says Atwood. “I’m a 1950s workaholic. We had to go through Grade 13 with lots of homework.”

But her output? “That’s just because I’m old. Like fluff under the bed, it’s accumulative. If I’d had a list like that when I was 25 ... It stretches out, a novel every three or four years is not that prolific.”

What about her new novel?

“I’m not going to talk about things I’ve not yet finished, dear,” she says, affecting an old-lady voice. “It’s very, very bad karma.”

Our interview has been allotted 45 minutes, including the time with Star photographer Marta Iwanek, and Atwood is getting ready to go. We talk about whether there are gender-specific ways of committing murder. She says she wouldn’t be good at writing crime fiction, although she has a nice little example in the title tale of Stone Mattress.

One story, “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth,” was originally published in The Walrus in 2012, after its editors asked her to revisit characters in 1993’s The Robber Bride. Gossip about the book in literary circles was that gorgeous, man-stealing Zenia was based on journalist Barbara Amiel, who married Conrad Black in 1992.

“I never said that. That was somebody else’s idea, never mine,” Atwood replies, calling Zenia a femme fatale.

Atwood leans heavily on her cane as she moves toward the door. I hadn’t noticed it in the hubbub of her arrival. Nor did I notice which foot she favoured.

It must be the toe.

Later, I sent an email to her publicist asking which toe caused the problem.

There was no response.

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